WITHOUT A TRACE is the newest TV series from Jerry Bruckheimer. Which CBS hopes will be a CSI-like blockbuster.
TV writers and producers aren't stupid. They know that on any given night the average television- watcher will run into two or three cop/lawyer/crime shows. So when making their own variation there must be "a twist." The twist to WITHOUT A TRACE, which is about the FBI's Missing Persons Task Force, is that, as people relate their last memories of those who have disappeared, we get to see it re-created flashback-style as Jack Malone (the leader of the task force) and his cronies envision it in their heads.
The problem is that this is a weak and unoriginal twist. It feels a lot like what they do on CROSSING JORDAN, when Jordan and her dad "act out" in their minds the crime she is trying to solve. Even though JORDAN has basically done away with this (it was getting repetitive), it still feels old. And worse: it doesn't add a thing to the show. If anything, it drags it down. I sort of liked it when Jack walked into a woman's apartment and was able to "see" the way she was the night she vanished. In her sweatpants and T-shirt, hanging out, watching TV. It establishes the "connection" he tries to reach with the missing person. But as the trick is repeated, with everyone on the team doing it, it becomes nothing but cheap and ineffective expository flashbacks, and grows rather irritating.
Plus, WITHOUT A TRACE doesn't need it. The script I read comes off as a competent but sub-LAW & ORDER crime show. It doesn't reinvent the genre, but it handles its job. It's only when it's trying to be "new and different" that it really derails. WITHOUT A TRACE didn't leave me drooling for the next installment, but it wasn't boring, either. It was just typical waste-your- time-before-bed, middle-of-the-road TV that could easily maintain a steady, good-sized audience.
The pilot's plot is so-so. I didn't see the ending coming, exactly, but when they announced the aha-here's-who-did-it I was disappointed. There were also some cheats and bad coincidences I didn't like. After the abrading flashbacks, the most ill-conceived thing about the script is to include a rookie who screws up because he's overeager to please. Man, that is so goddamned hoary. You'd have to go back to the invention of TV for that to be new or interesting! I'm assuming, though the character gets the boot from the Task Force, that he will be back to redeem himself.
What's weird about writer Hank Steinberg is that he at times writes sharp, snappy dialogue and gives Malone a personality that engages, and then turns around and lays out pure hackneyed stockpiles of tragic proportions. He has a woman write in an E-mail: "Just remember -- hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!" And then writes in the text, "She sends the E-mail, leans back, her expression untenable." Her expression untenable? That doesn't even make sense! Doesn't Steinberg know that no one outside of the jawdroppingly ignorant or dramatic would use that too-oft-abused saying? Or that no writer should ever use it unless it's for a punchline?
The biggest problem for WITHOUT A TRACE is that it reminds you too much of LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT, Rene Balcer's king-supreme creation that got better and better as it went along. Jack Malone, like Vincent D'Onofrio's Detective Robert Goren, is extraordinarily bright (Malone went to Princeton), freakily intuitive, and likes to use his keenly incisive knowledge of people to break them down and give up their motivations. The difference, I think, and why CRIMINAL INTENT has the edge, is because of D'Onofrio. The imposing man, with his question mark of a smirking expression, hops around and jumps onto suspects, pals around with them, joking, or infuriates them by nitpicking their insecurities. The writing on the show is excellent, but D'Onofrio plays Goren like a genius who's so smart and so bored with the speed everyone else travels at that he has to keep his synapses clicking like snapping fingers. D'Onofrio invests so much into the character that it becomes a show unto itself week after week.
So while both shows are set in New York and skip the same path, I don't think that WITHOUT A TRACE will stand up to CRIMINAL INTENT. (It doesn't hurt that CRIMINAL INTENT, thanks to the always-piquantly- odd material supplied by Balcer, is able to tell any story it wants; WITHOUT A TRACE has to be about someone gone missing.)
WITHOUT A TRACE has Anthony LaPaglia. No slouch, to be sure, and an actor certainly able to bring a sense of urgency to these scripts. I'm sure LaPaglia, with his character-actor sensibility, like D'Onofrio before him, will stir up the material.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, from SECRETS & LIES, is once again stuck playing a secretary (well, she's not really, but she's seated behind a computer). When will someone wake up and give this woman a role of substance!
WITHOUT A TRACE isn't novel enough to explode like CSI, but if the right people work on the show I don't expect this to vanish any time soon
New Dale Midkiff role:
Nancy Drew (2002) (TV)
Credited cast overview:
Maggie Lawson .... Nancy Drew
Jill Ritchie .... Bess
Lauren Birkell .... George
Brett Cullen .... Carson Drew
Dale Midkiff .... Jimbo Mitchell
Kevin Tighe .... Coach
Marieh Delfino .... Teeny
James Avery (I) .... Professor Shifflin
Charlie Finn .... Hank
Nick Stabile .... Ned Nickerson